[froasty]

"Your pretended fear lest Error should step in, is like the man who would keep all the wine out the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge. If a man speak foolishly, ye suffer him gladly because ye are wise; if erroneously, the truth more appears by your conviction 'of him.' Stop such a man's mouth by sound words which cannot be gainsayed. If he speak blasphemously, or to the disturbance of the public peace, let the Civil Magistrate punish him: if truly, rejoice in the truth." -- Oliver Cromwell, 1650.

Within four years of this letter, Cromwell would essentially have to put these Presbyterian inquisitors down by force and assume guardianship of the country because these people never stop.

Coincidentally, Cromwell also held that the right to the liberty of conscience, a largely heretical view for another century, was a fundamental requirement of his Protectorate, which he had to personally safeguard against everyone.

"Is not liberty of conscience in religion a fundamental? … Liberty of conscience is a natural right; and he that would have it, ought to give it; having himself liberty to settle what he likes for the public. Every sect saith: “Oh, give me liberty!” But give him it, and to his power he will not yield it to anybody else. Where is our ingenuousness? Liberty of conscience – truly that’s a thing ought to be very reciprocal."

[anigbrowl]

Around the same time that Cromwell penned these inspiring words, he was also busy killing off hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland, amounting to maybe 40% of the population; perhaps as much as 80% in some parts of the country. I leave the reconciliation of his words with his actions as an exercise for the reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Irelan...

[froasty]

If you want to call Cromwell a hypocrite, the most tenable and intellectually honest but still ungrounded point of attack is that his support of liberty of conscience did not extend to Catholics.

His institutional anti-Catholicism and his suppression of the rebellion in Ireland were not aberrational by his context. That he was successful in achieving these objectives (e.g. defeating an insurrection and effectively criminalizing public Catholicism during the Protectorate) is the aberration. Cromwell was competent and that was his actual sin. He also happened to believe that self-directed (i.e. not dogmatic to a foreign power, e.g. Rome) conscience was a virtue to be established and maintained and for that should be seen as another facet of him as a human being.

That said, I don't disagree that the ethnically Irish have every reason to be livid that it happened, or that comparable events preceded and succeeded it through history, but to act as if Cromwell was categorically evil for what he did to the Irish is like saying America is categorically evil for firebombing Dresden in 1945. Yes, it was an atrocity given the perspective that distance and the luxury of time and peace provide, but it doesn't capture the whole provenance of the situation.

[anigbrowl]

It seems to me you can find champions of liberty whose nice-sounding ideals don't have to be rigidly compartmentalized from commission of genocide and assumption of dictatorial powers.

Conversely, you can take writings from figures like Pol Pot that sound like the epitome of high-mindedness and self-determination - as long as you choose to regard those as a different facet from the genocidal totalitarian one.

Most, perhaps all, dictators have a likeable and reasonable aspect, and exhibit humor and benign intentions toward the mass of people that they consider to embody the national spirit. Likewise, most idealists who leave a stamp on history either commit or endorse acts that are at odds with their stated principles, but we can form some idea of their overall sincerity by examining the perceptions of their contemporaries.